The novel After Life by Simon Funk has quite a few flashbacks to the world prior humanity's end, though it takes more than a year. I find it one of the more hopeful stories in the genre.
Your periodic reminder that in 1947, New York City vaccinated ~6.35 million people (80% of their population) for smallpox in less than a month. If you do not think we can do this, what changed to make it impossible?
What changed? We started looking for every possible negative consequence of rolling out vaccines that quickly, and then working to mitigate each and every one.
Neat. I work for DLA. Thanks for the update.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for the insightful news. I consider these posts essential reading.
Once again, thank you for these incredibly informative posts.
Thank you for all this useful information and analysis.
Thank you very much for posting these.
I agree it fits well here. However, it has a very different tone from other posts on the MIRI blog, where it has also been posted.
Laziness. Though I note Stuart_Armstrong had the same opinion as me, and offered even fewer means of improvement, and got upvoted. I should have also said I agree with all points contained herein, and that the message is an important one. That would have reduced the bite.
This article is very heavy with Yudkosky-isms, repeats of stuff he's posted before, and it needs a good summary, and editing to pare it down. I'm surprised they posted it to the MIRI blog in its current form.
Edit: As stated below, I agree with all the points of the article, and consider it an important message.
I'll agree that it's more than a little redundant, especially when I understood the point he was getting at in the first part. But how much of that is the fault of his writing here and how much of it is the fault of the fact that he's written about the issue before? And, more importantly, if you were to hand this article to someone who knows nothing about Yudkowsky or Less Wrong, would that extra length help them? I'd argue that a lot of the article's length comes from trying to avoid some of his most common problems - instead of r
Any RSS feeds?
Thanks. Key quote:
What this indicates is not that deep learning in particular is going to be the Game Over algorithm. Rather, the background variables are looking more like "Human neural intelligence is not that complicated and current algorithms are touching on keystone, foundational aspects of it." What's alarming is not this particular breakthrough, but what it implies about the general background settings of the computational universe.
Even in that case, whichever actor has the most processors would have the largest "AI farm", with commensurate power projection.
That interview is indeed worrying. I'm surprised by some of the answers.
Great news! I've been waiting for this kind of thing.
More likely, he also "always thought that way," and the extreme story was written to provide additional drama.
Thank you for replicating the experiment!
Somewhat upper middle class job; low cost of living, inexpensive hobbies, making donations a priority.
I donated $5000 today and continue my $1000 monthly donations.
Where are you getting that much money?
Woah. Thanks!
So MIRI and LW are no longer a focus for you going forward?
Note XiXiDu preserves every potential negative aspect of the MIRI and LW community and is a biased source lacking context and positive examples.
I am a member for more than 5 years now. So I am probably as much part of LW as most people. I have repeatedly said that LessWrong is the most intelligent and rational community I know of.
To quote one of my posts:
I estimate that the vast majority of all statements that can be found in the sequences are true, or definitively less wrong. Which generally makes them worth reading.
I even defended LessWrong again...
Skin reacts to light, too.
The FAQ addresses Crohn's Disease: "more data needed".
https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/articles/200838449-Will-Soylent-help-my-Crohns-or-IBS-
It also has a full list of ingredients.
https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/articles/200789315-Soylent-1-0-Nutrition
One thing from the link above that I didn't previously know: "The Soylent recipe is based on the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and is approved as a food by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)." (emphasis theirs)
No agreement. It's a polarizing topic, even here.
No reason to apologize. It's a good time for another thread, since it's actually out now.
Here's my review of Soylent and a taskification of how I use it.
Pros:
Cons:
Preparation Process:
I pledged to continue donating $1,000 per month.
I also convinced a friend to donate for the first time.
Who cares about whether a decision taken years ago was sensible, or slightly-wrong-but-within-reason, or wrong-but-only-in-hindsight, etc. ?
XiXiDu cares about every Eliezer potential-mistake.
Forum drama is noise, not signal.
I didn't realize the grand prize was based on daily unique donors until I got the 'urgent' email. I got my dad to chip in $10, too. Looks like the other leading organization has more friends and family.
My apologies, I won't be able to make it. Work unexpectedly kept me up until 3am, and my body punished me with sleep.
I'll be coming.
Jon's what I call normal-smart. He spends most of his time watching TV, mainly US news programs, and they're quite destructive to rational thinking, even if the purpose is for comedic fodder and to discover hypocrisy. He's very tech averse, letting the guests he has on the show come in with information he might use, trusting (quite good) intuition to fit things into reality. As such, I like to use him as an example of what more normal people feel about tech / geek issues.
Every time he has one of these debates, I really want to sit down as moderator so I ca...
Immediate thoughts, before reading comments: One-box. I had started to think more deeply until I read the part about being run over for factoring, and for some reason my brain applied it to reasoning about this topic as a whole and spit out a final answer.
Intuitively, it seemed one boxing would get me a million, as per standard Newcomb. The lottery two million seemed like gravy above that (diminishing marginal utility of money), with a potential for 3 million total. Since they're independent, the word "separately" and its description made it seem like the lottery was unable to be affected by my actions at all. Thus, take box B, and hope for a lottery win. Definitely don't over think it, or risk a trolley encounter.
Glad to hear. It is interesting data that you managed to bring in 3 big name trolls for a single thread, considering their previous dispersion and lack of interest.
AMF/GiveWell charities to keep GiveWell and the EA movement growing while actors like GiveWell, Paul Christiano, Nick Beckstead and others at FHI, investigate the intervention options and cause prioritization, followed by organization-by-organization analysis of the GiveWell variety, laying the groundwork for massive support for the top far future charities and organizations identified by said processes
Cool, if MIRI keeps going, they might be able to show FAI as top focus with adequate evidence by the time all of this comes together.
Build up general altruistic capacities through things like the effective altruist movement or GiveWell's investigation of catastrophic risks
I read every blog post they put out.
Invest money in an investment fund for the future which can invest more [...] when there are better opportunities
I figure I can use my retirement savings for this.
(recalling that most of the value of MIRI in your model comes from major institutions being collectively foolish or ignorant regarding AI going forward)
I thought it came from them being collectively foolish or ig...
Anchoring from my butt-number?
The method is even more important (practice vs. perfect practice, philanthropy vs. givewell). I believe in the mission, not MIRI per se. If Eliezer decided that magic was the best way to achieve FAI and started searching for the right wand and hand gestures rather than math and decision theory, I would look elsewhere.
I subscribe to the view that AGI is bad by default, and don't see anyone else working on the friendliness problem.
I'm not sure which fallacy you're invoking, but saying (to paraphrase), 'superintelligence is likely difficult to aim' and 'MIRI's work may not have an impact' are certainly possible, and already contribute to my estimates.
I'm pessimistic and depressed.
Could you clarify your definition of success?
From MIRI's mission statement: "the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive impact."
I see smarter-than-human intelligence as required to overcome the combined threat of existential risks in the long run.
I thought it was funny when Derek said, "I can explain it without jargon."
It seems to be conflating 'morality' with 'success'. Being able to predict the future consequences of an act is only half the moral equation - the other half is empathy. Human emotion, as programmed by evolution, is the core of humanity, and yet seems derided by the author.